Can Google Siriously compete with Apple?

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Apple’s release of iOS 5 and the unveiling of Siri has everyone talking excitedly about the benefits of a digital assistant that can understand natural language. Having seen the demo of what Siri is capable of, though, I cannot help but think of how much better Google’s implementation of a similar service might be. More than that, with the raw data Google has access to, there’s no reason Big G shouldn’t unveil a competing service — and a couple reasons it should.

Google already has the infrastructure glued together at the seams of your interaction with the web. How much work would it be for them to utilize that data? If you look at Google’s history, it hasn’t exactly been amazing in the field of social media. Google Buzz was an absolute flop, and social services like Orkut that Google ran never really got off the ground worldwide. With that being said, the opportunity is there. Google Plus looks pretty close to social media done right (mostly), which might finally mean Google’s ready to break out of the impartial, robotic search space and into something a little more personal.

Let’s take a closer look at the pieces of the Google-Siri puzzle.

Search

The cornerstone of Google’s offering is, of course, search. So ubiquitous that it’s become a verb in common parlance, users “google it” millions of times a day, and those searches help Google as much as they help the user. Google saves searches for 18 months, and what you search for is as critically important to Google as is how you frame the searches. With instant searches and location-based services working on both mobile and normal searches, Google has the capability to save what you’re looking for and where, as well as what you end up clicking on.

This is an incredible advantage from any advertising or sales perspective, as tracking user habits is more or less money in the bank if you can place your product correctly and in a timely fashion. If you’re using your mobile phone to perform the search, all the better; Google knows exactly where you are and what you’re looking for. Who’s in a better position to offer you products and services than a company with that information?

Location services

Touched on above, this bears a further mention. Companies like Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and others all desperately want to know where you are and what you’re doing in order to offer you targeting advertising and services. It’s said that losing a star in your rating on Yelp can cost a company thousands of dollars in revenue, and extra stars will benefit in the same fashion. With the number of smartphone users exploding worldwide, location-based services should expect the same sort of popularity increase. It’s yet an untapped market.

Enter Latitude; Google’s answer to these services, tied into Google Maps and prominently seen in Google searches. The integration with Maps makes it seamless enough that you might not even know it’s there — you’re just looking for a place to eat. Google knows, though, and it remembers where you’ve been — and you can be sure it’s paying attention to where you’re going, too.

Social networking

On the face of it, Google Plus doesn’t seem like it would tie into the sort of service being discussed, but you’d be leaving out an incredibly important facet of Google’s growing clout out of the picture: the power of social media and free advertising. Google’s fledgling social media creation has netted some 40 million users at this point, and it’s not a coincidence that Latitude check-ins post to your public Circles by default. The best advertising is free, and as more and more users rank and check in to businesses using Google, everyone wins.

Purchases

This seems obvious. It doesn’t get any more basic than tracking your purchases via Google Wallet. By itself it might seem an innocuous convenience; an escape from having to carry a bulky wallet. From Google’s perspective, though, it’s filtering your money through their services. It’s another facet of your life that becomes data on a Google server. Marketable data, when correlated with other services.

Gmail

Again, putting this together with Google’s other services might seem odd. But if you think about how Google improved search to learn from your input, the advantage of having your email available for data mining becomes an invaluable tool. Google can already read enough into a message to say things like “You’ve mentioned something was attached to this email, yet nothing is. Do you want to attach a file?” This means Google is already scanning your email for important words and phrases. Expanding those search terms to include, well, everything, is what Google does best.

Minority report

Make no mistake. Google isn’t going to use this data to simply catalog what you do, where you go, or what you buy. It’s going to put all of this information together into a big heap and then squeeze it through computations to try and figure out what you’re going to do next.

The real money is in Google as a predictive service. For example, Google Latitude has an option that allows “auto check-in” at any location. That might not seem like much at face value, but it means your phone is obviously keeping track of where it is most of the time. Latitude already knows the location of thousands of businesses, and it has all of the data to know your routine. Knowing that you go to a particular gym three times a week is one thing. Being able to take that data and turn it into specialized deals and incentives are what’s going to separate Google services from the likes of Apple. Google intends to know what we’re going to do before we do, so it can be there to offer us whatever we need, whether it be products, services, or a helping hand.

Think about it from Google’s perspective of “Don’t be evil.” Taking all of this data and turning it into a goldmine of your personal habits will make Google the best possible personal assistant. Everything you’ve ever wanted, as long as you searched for it, Google knows. Everything you’ve purchased, via Google services, Google knows — and it knows when, and where. Things you’ve talked about in your daily dealing with social media or email, Google can parse. Everywhere you go, what route you take, and how long you stay Google will also know.

Apple’s Siri can tell you the weather. It can take dictation to send text messages. It can even setup calendar appointments and configure alerts and reminders. What it can’t do is spin years of search habits, purchases and information into a road-map of where you’re going to go, and react appropriately, effectively ahead of your own wants.

Google can’t do that yet, either. But it seems like it’s not far down the road.

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Randy Blasik

uhh.. google already has voice integration in thier search feature… they’ve had it for years.. I can say Navigate to Pizza hut, and it will take into account where I am on the map and navigate me to the nearest pizza hut. I can also say Call Pizza hut and it does the same thing, even if it’s not in my contacts…

I can say, send text to, send email to, weather, etc… Finally, the Android keyboard has a microphone on it. Where ever there is required text input just click the microphone and say what you were going to type.. That’s pretty similiar to Siri…

Anonymous

I have to agree on this. I will admit that the Siri presentation is more unified and conversational than most apps we’ve seen before on Google or other services, but the implementation of its foundation services is common place in android.
The praise for it is slightly mis-placed I think, and this it constantly seems like the unknowlegable speak as if no one could voice search on a windows mobile device or android.
Its presentation is the praise, but it hounds me for people being so excited about a feature without objectively realising its old news in a new coat. A Pretty coat, but still.

Anonymous

I have to agree on this. I will admit that the Siri presentation is more unified and conversational than most apps we’ve seen before on Google or other services, but the implementation of its foundation services is common place in android.
The praise for it is slightly mis-placed I think, and this it constantly seems like the unknowlegable speak as if no one could voice search on a windows mobile device or android.
Its presentation is the praise, but it hounds me for people being so excited about a feature without objectively realising its old news in a new coat. A Pretty coat, but still.

Anonymous

Not having to say commands perfectly and in exactly the right order is not “old news.” Google’s voice commands are like touchscreen phones before the iPhone: they compare well on paper when you’re looking at a list of bullet points, but are not even remotely in the same league in practice.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3I7XCOHRTCHH3WKZJ4FDIPVYWU blah

Google’s cut-andpaste-engineers are probably already cloning it. Must have sucked for them staying in line to buy one ASAP.

Anonymous

Oh god, why must there be ignorant fanboys. Google’s development team is way better than Apple’s. If anyone copy and pasted is Apple, oh wait they were the first one to come out with a notification bar, or anything else. iOS5 is pretty much Gingerbread with and Apple logo, but i guess you don’t care since you are willing to pay for the same device every year.

Brian Crail

I bet iOS6 includes iWidgets and homescreen organization.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3I7XCOHRTCHH3WKZJ4FDIPVYWU blah

Google’s cut-andpaste-engineers are probably already cloning it. Must have sucked for them staying in line to buy one ASAP.

Anonymous

And as I said, they get points for presentation. Its not the exact same system, natural dialogue from the company Apple bought is a wonderful advancement. My point is what many people praise, they praise without hindsight. Like awing at a new car because it drives, and not because it drives in a different way. It perpetuates an incorrect idea of what the company is really doing.
I’m not playing sides either, just making a point. I like the development, I like the functionality, what I don’t like is the misplaced… awe. Just my personal opinion.

Anonymous

Let’s get one thing straight. Siri is merely an intermediary between you and the Apple servers that send back a response. They have licensed Nuance technology (what actually does the voice to text).

Example:

You: “What’s the weather like today?”
-Nuance changes the voice to text and presents it to Siri.
Siri: “Let me check on that for you”
-Siri passes the text to Apple servers
-Apple servers match up a response and send back a command show the weather to Siri.
-Siri says “Here’s the weather” and shows it.

In other words, Siri doesn’t do any voice recognition or answer finding itself. The new implementation of using a server which info can be added to (leading to more responses) is the only thing that’s new about this. Google’s voice recognition (which they made themselves and didn’t license from Nuance) is not quite as good as Nuance’s, but it’s a close second. They said they improved it with the release of ICS.. we will see. IMO all those servers Apple uses for Siri are a giant waste. There are only so many functions that are actually useful that you’d want to dictate instead of hand enter.. these could easily be programmed right into the memory of the phone itself eliminating the need for network dependence. In other words, having 10 responses to “I love you Siri” is novel and practically useless after the first bit of entertainment you get from it.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

Randy–I haven’t used Siri, but I do use Google Voice Search a lot and one thing I’ve noticed is that while you can _start_ a session with voice, all the follow-ups revert to the touch interface.

For example, I just asked my phone “Navigate to Pizza Hut” and then had to 1) Verify the interpretation with a click, and 2) Verify which Pizza Hut with a click. Not a biggie if I’m sitting at my desk, but breaks up the flow and doesn’t work that well by driving.

I would think that Siri differentiates by actually having a back and forth via voice, e.g. asking me the confirmation/clarifying questions orally, and letting me respond the same way?

Brian Crail

Well it depends on what you ask. Try to include a zip code. I find that works best to limit the choices. “Call Pizza Hut 34562″ will instantly call. Same with everything else. It only gives you options when you too vaguely search for something.

Of course you can alternate the zip code for city and state, but zip works best. I use it mostly for when I’m at home and looking to call local businesses. I use City and state when I travel and it works just fine.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

Brian–Cool about the zip code, at least for when I know one to give it (often my issue is that I’m somewhere new and want to track down the place I’m meeting someone, etc., and if I’m driving it has tended to be a non-starter, requiring me to pull over for the interaction — possibly a good safety move in any event).

Randy Blasik

uhh.. google already has voice integration in thier search feature… they’ve had it for years.. I can say Navigate to Pizza hut, and it will take into account where I am on the map and navigate me to the nearest pizza hut. I can also say Call Pizza hut and it does the same thing, even if it’s not in my contacts…

I can say, send text to, send email to, weather, etc… Finally, the Android keyboard has a microphone on it. Where ever there is required text input just click the microphone and say what you were going to type.. That’s pretty similiar to Siri…

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3I7XCOHRTCHH3WKZJ4FDIPVYWU blah

Fanboiiiiii, by the time Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Intellectual Ventures and other get paid for each Android sold, it will be ova.

http://profiles.google.com/kennjason Jason Kennedy

Ha!

I appreciate the sentiment, but if you ask around you’ll find I actually tend to bash Android instead of praise it. :P

Anonymous

I hope that the nightmare you describe never comes to pass. Google is a terrifying company that knows way too much about its products (you didn’t think that you were actually the customer, did you?).

http://profiles.google.com/kennjason Jason Kennedy

Is it really terrifying, though? Think about how much information you willingly hand to search engines (and the internet) every day.

Anonymous

Just think what could be done if a company used IBM’s Watson (system that won Jeopardy) as the backend to analyze and answer people’s queries. This system would be used all the time from doing simple things to helping kids with their homework. If only Watson were cheaper, I’d start it myself.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

They are kind of different use-cases — Watson basically has a huge database of DATA. Raw facts. Siri interacts with web services and phone apps.

Try downloading Jeannie from the android market. It’s done what siri does for years now, except it actually does it much better (2 people got new iphones last week in my office and we compared). You can ask it more abstract questions like: How strong is chuck norris?, What came first the chicken or the egg? etc..
and actually get very very good answers back.

It’s just voice -> search engines and stuff most of the time anyways, not super revolutionary but I thought i’d mention it. You can have a full conversation with it too, it’s hallarious.
Download it and ask it “how big is an xbox” for example.

Colin Richardson

I think there may be an error. It says by default, Google Latitude auto checkins are public. But I cannot even get it to do that. My AUTO checkin’s always change to “Latitude Friends”, If I tell it to go to something else, it disables the auto checkin.

Colin Richardson

I think there may be an error. It says by default, Google Latitude auto checkins are public. But I cannot even get it to do that. My AUTO checkin’s always change to “Latitude Friends”, If I tell it to go to something else, it disables the auto checkin.

Anonymous

Voice interaction has been available on Google services and Android for a long time. The only new thing that Siri brings to the table is context-awareness which serves to filter down searches. Experienced Internet searchers can produce the same or much better results by knowing what to search for. Siri is good — when it works and when it understands what you say perfectly. Google’s voice services are much better than Apple right now when it comes to accuracy of recognition and service availability. Yes, Google (or a third party) can and should make an app available that beats Siri, but only for those users who are looking to go Google but are looking for a Siri counterpart.

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